Werner Herzog is considered by many the most brilliant of the young German filmmakers who make up the New Cinema movement in their country. Signs of Life was his first feature, and gathered this appraisal at the New York Film Festival: “Deceptively beautiful landscapes and dangerous idylls on a Greek island during the German occupation provide the setting for Werner Herzog's mysterious parable, in which a modern Don Quixote, apathetic and inhibited, is at last stung into rebellion against society and reveals the first senseless signs of his humanity only in insanity, as he pitifully lays siege to an unsuspecting town. A strange, intense work... influenced by Borges and Kafka. The hypnotic probing of cruelty, indifference and unspoken horrors becomes a metaphysical comment on man and his ideologies.”